Too many web sites are designed to serve the indulgences of designers, rather than the commercial needs of businesses.

Web design in its truest sense, i.e. interface design is actually a combination of two disciplines, content structure and visual design.  An authentic web design project will include as much time dedicated to structuring information around the needs of your users as it will ensuring that your site is brand friendly, quick to download and aesthetically pleasing.  Regrettably, this slightly less glamorous task of information architecture is missing in many web projects today, affecting everything from customer satisfaction, to search engine performance to website potential effectiveness.  Subsequently too many websites suffer from poor navigation.

Unfortunately, many who ignore this discipline should know better.  There has been a large body of research and development in the ten years of the web’s life to ensure that the theory of good design and structure is well established.  Bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium have produced guidelines (WAI) to help organisations produce websites that are accessible to the largest possible number of people.  Within the UK the RNIB have produced excellent documentation to provide guidance on developing interfaces friendly to those with blindness, visual impairment or colour blindness.  Bobby is a worldwide benchmark for encouraging usability.

Whilst there is subjectivity in design, these bodies of research have now established that there are objective benchmarks that must be considered in the appropriate design and structuring of a website.  There is a neat analogy between the discipline of structuring content and designing websites, and the discipline of architecture.  In each situation there are some well researched rules and regulations, in one case the laws of physics, in another case the research as detailed above.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for creativity – to the contrary, creativity can be expressed within the parameters of the subject area.

Pretentious, slow to download, impossible to navigate sites leave users frustrated, search engines confused and businesses who have invested money in the development disillusioned.

Your users must dominate your website design process.  It is they who will be using the fruits of our labour and they who will consider clean content more important than animation, key information up front more important than a multimedia introduction, and compliance to usability standards more important than off the wall navigation.